Watchdog group files complaint over clothing purchases for Palin family
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A watchdog group filed a complaint yesterday with the Federal Election Commission against Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, the Republican National Committee, and several political operatives associated with the RNC, alleging that they improperly spent $150,000 on clothing for Palin and her family.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics cited news reports that clothing and accessories purchases for Palin and her family included $49,425 spent at Saks Fifth Avenue and $75,062 at
But the law has a loophole for money raised, not by individual candidates, but by political parties. Asked repeatedly yesterday about Palin's wardrobe, presidential candidate John McCain answered each question more or less the same way: "She needed clothes at the time. They'll be donated at end of this campaign. They'll be donated to charity," said McCain, who added that the RNC doesn't buy his clothes.
Asked whether he was surprised at the amount spent, McCain replied, "Nothing surprises me."
GLOBE STAFF AND
ASSOCIATED PRESS
McCain ticks off long list of grievances with Bush
John McCain is really trying to distance himself from one of the most unpopular presidents in history.
In an interview published yesterday in the Washington Times, the Republican presidential nominee gave his longest list yet of disagreements with President Bush.
"Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously," McCain said.
"Those are just some of them," he added with a laugh.
In the last debate, McCain pointedly told Democrat Barack Obama that he is not President Bush and that if Obama wanted to run against Bush, he should have run four years ago.
Obama routinely tries to tie McCain to Bush, asserting that his rival has voted with the president 90 percent of the time.
FOON RHEE
McCain's election night rally will be held outdoors
Republican John McCain is not going to hold his election night rally in the traditional style - at a podium standing in front of a sea of campaign workers and supporters.
Instead, announcing yesterday what is hopefully billed "Victory Election Night 2008" at the Arizona Biltmore hotel, he plans to address a small group of supporters and reporters on the hotel lawn. His remarks will be simultaneously piped electronically to the party inside and other reporters in a media filing center, aides said, because of space limitations.
Thomas Patterson, a government professor at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, & Public Policy at Harvard University, called the arrangement "unusual," but said the campaign may simply be bowing to the reality that the candidate's remarks are geared toward the televised audience rather than those in the hall.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ACORN overstated tally of newly registered voters
On Oct. 6, the community organizing group ACORN and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote's executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.
The remainder are made up of registered voters who were changing their address and roughly 400,000 who were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms, and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors, Slater acknowledged.
In registration drives, it is common for a percentage of newly registered voters to be disqualified for various reasons, although specialists say the percentage is higher when groups pay workers to gather registrations. But the disclosure yesterday that 30 percent of ACORN's registrations were faulty was described by Republicans as further proof of what they said was ACORN's effort to unfairly tilt the election.
"We were wondering how many were Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse," said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.
Over the past few weeks, the registration drive of ACORN has become a flashpoint in the campaign when the flood of new voter registrations prompted complaints from election officials about the high number of improper submissions. State and local officials have begun investigations into possible fraudulent activity in at least 10 states.
Accusations of impropriety by a Republican vote registration campaign surfaced this week in California, where the authorities arrested the owner of a firm hired by the California Republican Party to register voters.
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
